Reviews Archive for April, 2012

But wait a minute. This isn’t the kind of horror that puts money in your pockets. A loser roaming the streets and expiring in a hospital? Not in our bottom-line, money-obsessed, failure-hating age. Let’s imagine something more horrible — and certainly more modern, more suitable to contemporary tastes.

Like JFK’s legacy, the movie version of “Camelot” hasn’t aged well in the succeeding nearly 50 years. In fact, after knocking ’em dead on Broadway in the early 1960s, the movie version failed to overwhelm Oscar voters or attract nearly the same number of fans as “My Fair Lady.”

I’ve never visited Japan, and probably I never will. But if I get there, I know I’ll dream of seeing several things, all of which, to me, signify “Japanese cinema“ and “Japan.” A furious Kurosawa swordfight caught by three cameras. Two Ozu characters sitting on tatami mats, musing on the sadness of life. A geisha or wife suffering while Mizoguchi’s camera tracks slowly and beautifully around her. Something tragic or transgressive caught lucidly by Ichikawa or Imamura. And, rising up from the ocean, while the sun sets, Honda’s Godzilla (excuse me, Gojira), staring toward Tokyo and licking his chops.

Ti West’s movie is loaded with seedy atmosphere and cracked wacko personality, and I much preferred it to the over-expensive blood-drenched massacres they usually give us. Paxton’s Claire and Healy’s Luke are engagingly scarable protagonists. The cellar is a doozy.

The movie has its flaws — that outlandishly implausible ending chiefly among them — but compared to most of the un-naturalistic, unfunny, unserious, totally phony and sometimes obnoxiously ageist and condescendingly smart-ass gloppy stuff that often passes for American movie comedy-drama these days (and that sometimes gets a pass from the same people who pile on movies like “Darling Companion”), it’s a movie that deserves some encouragement.

Even if “Shame” doesn’t offer many answers and fewer resolutions, it can’t be said that we don’t know these people after 101 minutes in their presence. It feels like a fully realized short story or novella. The acting is terrific and McQueen’s direction delivers a real punch. It’s not an easy movie to watch, though, so viewers not looking for a challenge may want to think twice before renting it.

The young Adonis-like Brando was the actor whom critics and Britons believed would be the American stage and screen’s great Hamlet. (But he never even tried.) He was the player for whom Tennessee Williams wrote play after play year after year. (But Brando turned them all down, except for the Sidney Lumet movie of “Orpheus Descending,” retitled “The Fugitive Kind)”.

In the mid-’60s, the demographics of daytime TV were significantly different than those associated with prime-time sitcoms. Fewer women worked in full-time jobs and they tended to control buying patterns at the supermarket. Romance in the afternoon was blooming and it didn’t include fangs and capes. Even so, Dan Curtis’ brainstorm would enjoy a six-year run, thanks, in large part, to support from teenagers who rushed home from school – or, so we’re told – to enjoy the kinky storylines and handsome undead characters. “Dark Shadows” was as different from “The Guiding Light” and “The Days of Our Lives” as “American Bandstand” was to “Lawrence Welk.”

You think Michael Curtiz is a hack? It‘s only because he made so many movies. But his list of hundreds includes two or three dozen genuine classics. And the other several hundred aren’t bad either. In fact, director-movie-lover Rainer Werner Fassbinder ranked Curtiz at the top of his list, next to Luchino Visconti and Douglas Sirk.

It‘s a picture that seems close to perfect of its kind and one of the ‘70s films I love best. Gorgeous and terrifying and sometimes funny as hell, Chinatown tells a romantic/tragic/murder mystery tale of official crimes and personal corruption raging around the real-life L. A. Water scandal, with private sin and public swindles steadily stripped bare by J. J. Gittes (one of Jack Nicholson‘s signature roles), a cynical, natty, smart-ass Hammetesque shamus, with a nose for corruption and a hot-trigger temper

Meryl Streep, the American movie star who plays/ impersonates/ inhabits/ incarnates Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” is not only one of the greatest movie actresses of the 20th and 21st centuries, an artist of confounding competence, flawless mimicry and consistent brilliance, but a smart student of life and humanity who who can vanish into her parts totally. And here, she’s giving what is certainly one of her most impressive performances.

Just the reintroduction of Jim‘s pop and The Stiffmeister alone is enough to raise a litle indecent notalgia in this movie. Or bonhomie, maybe. Not enough to make it a good movie, but at least enough to avoid it being an irredeemably bad one.

Méliès’ great little show was first released in the black-and-white prints most of us know, but also in an original hand-tinted color version that was missing for nearly a century. But that second version, discovered in a Spanish film library in 1995, has now been definitively restored in colors as radiant and luscious as ice cream melting in a silver tureen.

If only “We Bought a Zoo” could do for zoos what “Sideways” did for wine, we’d all be in clover and up to our knees in humane enclosures. Although I’m a big fan of zoos myself (especially San Diego’s and the giraffe and bear enclosures at the Lincoln Park Zoo) and though this is a likable movie, full of likable people, and likable animals and though star Matt Damon is a very paragon of likeability, the movie just vanishes out of your mind (or mine at least) after you leave.

The script of “War Horse,” a heart-crusher, is rife with coincidence, pulsing with melodrama. Violence and tragedy are often close to overwhelming it. But it’s also a good story, an often gripping one.

Gerardo Naranjo’s “Miss Bala” describes how weird things can get when the trajectories of a violent drug gang and contestants in a beauty pageant cross paths in Tijuana, one of the world’s most dangerous cities. “Miss Bala” is an extremely violent movie, as befits the times in Mexico’s drug war, but Lino’s determination to give Laura her shot at stardom borders on the hilarious. By the time she gets to the interview stage, Laura can barely remember her name. Naranjo uses Tijuana as well as Steven Soderbergh did in “Traffic” and the cruelty of the perpetrators of the violence is palpable throughout the movie.

“Chad Harbach spent ten years writing his novel. It was his avocation, for which he was paid nothing, with no guarantee he’d ever be paid anything, while he supported himself doing freelance work, for which I don’t think he ever made $30,000 a year. I sold his book for an advance that equated to $65,000 a year—before taxes and commission—for each of the years of work he’d put in. The law schools in this country churn out first-year associates at white-shoe firms that pay them $250,000 a year, when they’re twenty-five years of age, to sit at a desk doing meaningless bullshit to grease the wheels of the corporatocracy, and people get upset about an excellent author getting $65,000 a year? Give me a fucking break.”
~ Book Agent Chris Parris-Lamb On The State Of The Publishing Industry

INTERVIEWERDo you think this anxiety of yours has something to do with being a woman? Do you have to work harder than a male writer, just to create work that isn’t dismissed as being “for women”? Is there a difference between male and female writing?

FERRANTE
I’ll answer with my own story. As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me. That phase ended after a couple of years. At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained—indeed, it grew stronger—that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them. I devoured books at that age, and there’s no getting around it, my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men. I didn’t want to write like Madame de La Fayette or Jane Austen or the Brontës—at the time I knew very little about contemporary literature—but like Defoe or Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Hugo. While the models offered by women novelists were few and seemed to me for the most part thin, those of male novelists were numerous and almost always dazzling. That phase lasted a long time, until I was in my early twenties, and it left profound effects.
~ Elena Ferrante, Paris Review Art Of Fiction No. 228